June 30, 2010

Getting groceries means having to cross the 70th parallel, which fills me with an unjustifiable sense of regret. There's something glorious about being out and about in my shirtsleeves at 70˚N that loses all its savor down at 69˚59'. Never mind that I am still north of all of mainland Canada, north of Alaska (except for a tiny sliver of the North Slope) and very much north of you. We draw arbitrary lines on the globe and then behave in ways that give them a ghostly reality. I didn't come all this way to be walking south!

August 20, 2009

As I turn out of my hotel's full parking lot, veering onto the Strip, I come across something rarely seen in Vegas: frozen construction projects. I pass cranes abandoned at the site of the Echelon, a huge, multibillion-dollar project of four hotels that is now just three buildings of nine floors of concrete and steel beams sitting idly on some of the most expensive real estate in the country. I pass three more abandoned sites--63 empty steel floors of the Fontainebleau, a sad unfinished shell that was supposed to be Caesars Palace's Octavius Tower and two cranes halted on a structure that was supposed to be a St. Regis condo building. I then drive up to where the New Frontier was razed to build a resort modeled on New York City's Plaza Hotel. It's just a dirt wasteland, so ugly that Wynn planted a row of trees so his hotel guests wouldn't stare at it from their windows. I never realized an economic defeat could look so much like a military one.

June 23, 2009

Now, the TSA doesn't even trust pilots, who go through the same screening as the rest of us to make sure they’re not bringing something extraordinarily dangerous onto a plane like a 3.5 oz bottle of shampoo. Because, of course, with a little bottle of shampoo, they could make a bomb, which they could use to fly the plane they are piloting into a building, something that is impossible for mere pilots sitting at the controls of the jet.